Payday 3 Roadmap (April 2024): All DLC and Updates Coming In Year 1

As part of the latest operation Medic Bag update, Miodrag “Mio” Kovačević, game director on PAYDAY 3 revealed a new grenade as part of a new blog post.

This new shock grenade, nicknamed the 'The Pig Tickler 187', is coming "in a future update" so isn't available right now, but we do have plenty more information on how it will function.

Here's a bit more info:

"The shock grenade, also known by its in-universe name “The Pig Tickler 187”, is a new crowd control tool for your arsenal. When you throw the grenade, it explodes three times before it expires. Any enemy hit by any of the three explosions will become stunned for one second, and after the stun expires, they will become slowed for 3 seconds."

"While the grenade is pretty flashy, we don’t want it to just be a glorified flashbang, which is where its unique feature comes into play. Any enemy or civilian hit by the initial explosion will be the start of an electric arc. This arc will jump to the closest enemy seven times before it expires, as long as they’re not too far away from each other. Any enemy hit by the arc will get the full effect of the shock grenade’s stun. This gives it somewhat different coverage from the flashbang, as you could stun a group behind corners and not in a fixed radius. The downside compared to a flashbang is that enemies will be stunned for a shorter duration."

"While the actual grenade does no damage by itself, some law enforcement are more conductive than others; any Shield, Zapper or Techie hit by the shock grenade will die immediately. Sadly, the Dozer will maintain his crowd control resistance, so he won’t be shocked at your attempts to use this grenade against him."

Last night's PAYDAY 3 stream was joined by Game Director Mio for a live showcase of the new Adaptive Armor and Fortitude skill line in action. Take a look a learn more on the youtube video below:

In the second Operation Medic Bag blog post game director Miodrag “Mio” Kovačević spent some time discussing the new Adaptive Armor which is going to be introduced to Payday 3 in the future.

The blog post is pretty extensive so if you want the full overview, give it a read on the link. But in short, Adaptive Armor is intended to be a solution to existing issues with armor mechanics in the game, which large sections of the player base haven't quite jelled with.

The new Adaptive Armor is described as having two chunks of healthbars, each requiring 4.5 seconds to regenerate, with a lower damage reduction compared to regular armor but without permanent damage.

The post then goes on to discuss the strategic implications of using Adaptive Armor:

"In short, Adaptive Armor Lining does not take permanent “trauma” damage, but can also take less damage before a chunk breaks. If a chunk breaks, you still need to restore it with an Armor Bag, but, in theory, you can make it last forever if you take cover in time. In a practical sense, if you don’t want to deal with armor maintenance as much, this is the armor for you, and it will let you do some aggressive plays if you’re smart about it. However, utilizing regular armor and repair kits might last you much longer than the Adaptive Armor with certain builds. You can also pair it with the upcoming “Clean Slate” Tank Mastery that’s coming in the same patch as the armor. This skill will let you use armor repair kits to restore an armor chunk if you have no armor."

Overall, this looks like yet another positive change for Payday 3 and the game's long road to recovery.

Here it is, the long overdue answer to how the developers will revive Payday 3.

 This will form part of an "updated comprehensive roadmap" of what the team plans to do to the game throughout 2024.

"Summarizing all the feedback from our community, we have identified what we believe will be some of the most impactful changes to PAYDAY 3, listing them in this post."

This can be broken down into a few areas, but the full breakdown of information can be found further down this page, as there's a lot to take in.

The developers at Starbreeze know fans are not happy with the state of the game, but thankfully, they're doing something about it.

"We’re well aware that many of you aren’t satisfied with the game the way it is in its current state," the team told fans in a new blog post today. "Since launch, we’ve been reading your valuable feedback in forums, social media and in video comments in addition to the FeatureUpvote page. This helps us massively and is crucial to the continued development of PAYDAY 3.

In addition, the devs explained that they have "put together a strike team" comprised of veteran developers from the design, community, communication and production teams, principally with the focus on bringing PAYDAY 3 "up to where it will meet your expectations."

The team then committed to sharinga plan detailing the upcoming improvements as part of a blog coming this February.

It is clear to us that the community wants the ability to play PAYDAY 3 reliably and on your own terms. In order to meet that need, we will be doing two major changes to the current implementation.

Firstly, we will be developing a stand-alone solo mode you can get into without going through the matchmaking flow. This will be a local game, on your own machine, thereby circumventing the need to connect to a server.

We see this being rolled out in two phases:

• Phase One will still require an online connection to our backend systems for progression, unlocks, etc.
• Phase Two will look to improve on the solo mode implementation and allow you to play the game without requiring a constant internet connection. You will need to connect intermittently to our backend to upload your progression, but will otherwise be able to play offline. We’ll need to come back with details on exactly how this will pan out.

As playing co-op will always be dependent on connecting to another machine somewhere, we are seeking to implement the solution that provides the best balance between reliability, latency and overall experience. Our technical leadership have been evaluating options for the past months and will be able to share more details on the solution in the near future.

On the topic of cooperative play. Our matchmaking isn’t doing a good job of bringing people together. We have a number of social and cooperative features planned for the year as well as rebuilding our matchmaking functionality into a much more robust system.

Until those features are implemented, the current matchmaking will be supported by a quickplay functionality, ensuring you can reliably play with other players. Later in the year, we’re looking to bring back a Crime.Net style server browser.

Based on your feedback, as part of our Replayability & Progression initiative, our current challenge-based progression didn’t achieve the goals we intended, so we’ve decided to do away with the current system.

The challenges will be removed and we’ll switch infamy progression to be tied to heist completion. As part of this, we will revisit all the current heist payout values, add scaling per bag secured for Infamy Points and also a new bonus that rewards loud playstyles. The existing challenge framework will be repurposed to give cosmetic rewards for hardcore accomplishments instead.

We’ll be working on creating a more intuitive UI that better explains what’s happening around the player as well including a simplified friends menu as well as a menu UI that better communicates the heisting theme. We’ll be rolling out improvements and eventually a revamp of most of the current UI during 2024.

In addition, we intend to deliver on and expand our promises for new content. There are 3 DLCs still planned for 2024 and we intend to add another free heist for PAYDAY 3 in this same period.

We will also be rolling out skill lines, cosmetic items, rewards, a free LMG primary and much more throughout the year.

We’ve received feedback regarding the DLC pricing not meeting player expectations. As a result, we are currently reviewing the pricing on upcoming DLCs.

Once we are satisfied with the improvements we’re intending to make to PAYDAY 3, we’ll revisit this topic in 2025.

We have reallocated the resources dedicated to the Unreal Engine 5 update to instead work on the improvements to the PAYDAY 3 experience. Since the UE5 update wouldn’t directly fix the current problems, we’ll come back to this topic once we are able.

Many things mentioned need preparation or other features in place to be implementable. There are a number of items that we can start working on immediately. As such, we have a list of goals that we would like to finish by summer 2024. We won’t go into great detail on any of these topics, but will list them here:

• Quickplay v1
• Loadout Renaming
• Recurring Smaller Content Drops
• Controller Improvements
• Vote Kick
• Rotating Stealth Modifiers
• Unready Button
• Play Again Feature
• Merge Players into Party Post Match
• Daily Activities with Rewards
• Mask Vendor with Weekly Rotating Inventory
• Communication Wheel Improvements v1

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